The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
by Paul Gilroy
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"Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold book sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of show more cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism." "Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas and Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W.E.B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison." "In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic."--Jacket show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Surely the worst book ever written about a great idea. The chapter on Wright was pretty good, the chapter on Dubois and 'Hegel' possibly the worst I've ever read, mainly because Gilroy seems to have followed the Althusser approach to analysis of philosophical argument, that is, not reading the book (Hegel's Phenomenology) he's talking about. Vastly influential, unreadable and unconvincing- but that central idea was a great one.
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Author Information
20+ Works 1,422 Members
Paul Gilroy holds the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics and is the author of The Black Atlantic and Against Race (both from Harvard).
Awards and Honors
Awards
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Reference, History, Literature Studies and Criticism, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 903 — History & geography History Dictionaries, encyclopedias, concordances of history
- LCC
- CB235 .G55 — Auxiliary Sciences of History History of Civilization History of Civilization Civilization and race
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 605
- Popularity
- 48,531
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.57)
- Languages
- 6 — English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 14
- ASINs
- 2
